American Matthew Polenzani is one of the most gifted and distinguished lyric tenors of his generation. His elegant musicianship, innate sense of style, and dramatic commitment find him at the largest and most prestigious operatic, concert, and recital venues in the world. He comes to the Armory with a program of lieder and art songs that offer audiences the chance to get to know the beauty of his sound, the musicality of his legato, the suppleness of his phrasing, and the clarity of his diction in one of the only spaces that could provide such a personal encounter—the Board of Officers Room.

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Recital Series

Park Avenue Armory

For more than 400 years, the Black American spiritual tradition has moved over, across, and through the waters—waters of life force, passage, cleansing, resistance, and renewal—depicted in such songs and verses as “Wade in the Water,” “Deep River,” “Crossing Jordan,” and “By the Waters of Babylon.”

The power of water and its spiritual dimensions equally resonates in the beautiful, sacred texts of Bach’s cantatas. Infused with poetry, Bach’s music sounds and speaks to every drop of water, in drought and in full flood, moving and alive.

Shall We Gather at the River

How do we process conflicts and friction amongst close allies? And in discussion and debate, are antagonism and disagreement crucial to creating revolutionary transformation? These questions serve as the starting point for this gathering of artists, performers, scholars, and theorists in an evocative examination of the poetics of disagreement.

Led by playwright and poet Claudia Rankine, this symposium is punctuated with performances, panels, investigations of group dynamics, as well as imagined conversations between revolutionary thinkers. Participants include renowned postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, acclaimed cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, and Guggenheim fellow and choreographer Shamel Pitts.

Antagonisms: a Gathering

Dissolving boundaries between stage, dancer, musician, and spectator to subvert conventional notions of experiencing dance, this Armory commission celebrates the freedom, energy, and intimacy that run through the best of club culture and modern dance.

R.o.s.e.

While many see clubbing as a murky night out in a sweaty nightclub, an abandoned warehouse, or at an open-air rave with no connection to more wholesome things that happen during the day, club culture has long been an important incubator of cultural movements and continues to provide spaces for connection, creativity, and personal expression.

This afternoon salon brings together scholars, writers, artists, and nightlife makers to enlighten nightlife as an art form, and discover the ways social and performative dance have intertwined in recent years.

Day for Night: a Salon on Art and Nightlife

Having first dazzled Armory" class="css-u850">Armory audiences with her participation in the Lindemann Young Artist recital in 2019, soprano Leah Hawkins has gone on to perform career-defining roles on some of the world’s leading opera stages including the Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Dutch National Opera, and Opéra National de Paris. She returns to the Armory recital stage to showcase her global journey with a collection of folk songs and proverbs from various cultural and religious traditions, from American and Yiddish to Jamaican, Swahili, and others. The program features works by composers and arrangers including Jasmine Barnes, Peter Ashbourne, Robert De Cormier, and a thrilling world premiere.

One of the most unique and influential artists of our time, Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director, choreographer, filmmaker, and creator that has devoted her life to exploring the potential of the human voice. A pioneer of extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary art, she weaves together new modes of perception to expand the boundaries of music, performance, and installation. This living legend returns to the Armory with her latest creation, an immersive work that is part performance, part installation, inspired by Indra’s Net, a parable that illustrates life’s interconnectedness.

Indra’s Net

Garnering international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman is consistently praised for his sensitive and intelligent musicianship, riveting stage presence, and beautiful voice while regularly performing on the world’s greatest stages. The Grammy Award winner has also earned acclaim for his inventive programming, which is on full display in a varied program of works examining the relationship of East and West performed with guitarist Sean Shibe. Featuring wide ranging works from Monteverdi, Britten, and Purcell to Takemitsu, Layale Chaker, and traditional Sephardic songs, this intimate recital inspects the artists own ethnic identities through song that at once was seen to exotify but through playful juxtaposition subverts that narrative into one of celebration.

Recital Series: Karim Sulayman & Sean Shibe

Singer and performance artist Dorian Wood exhibits a 12-hour composition and installation inspired by a lyric written by the late Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parr. Combining both live performances with a chamber quartet and pre-recorded movements, the durational work mixes a genre-defying canon of folk, pop, and experimental music of Central and Latin America. Developed in harmony with the Armory’s historic period rooms and specifically the craftspeople that constructed the building at its inception, this Armory commission spotlights timely issues of migration and emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a vessel for social change.

Canto De Todes: Song for All

Playwright, director, producer, and actress Radha Blank is a born and raised New Yorker, harnessing the city’s living history and culture—the immigrant communities, ethnic groups, working-class folks, and struggling artists—to inspire her work as a storyteller and an artist. With writing credits that include her play SEED and popular TV series She’s Gotta Have It, Empire, and The Get Down, Blank also won the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival for her semi-autobiographical feature film The 40-Year-Old Version, which was named one of 2020’s top films by The New Yorker and both New York Times critics. She continues the artistic throughline of that project and its lead character, which vacillated between the worlds of hip-hop and theater to find her true voice, with a new mixtape performed live in the Veterans Room.

Artist Studio series: Radha Blank

Soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan is no stranger to captivating Armory audiences and critics alike, making her US recital debut in 2017 with a residency looking at the legacy of the Second Viennese School and the works of trailblazer Erik Satie, and returning in 2019 with artfully curated programs including the New York premiere of John Zorn’s Jumalatteret and Schoenberg’s String Quartet No.2 performed with the Emerson String Quartet. The Canadian musician makes her highly anticipated return to the Board of Officers Room with another dazzling program that beautifully spotlights her standing at the forefront of creation, embodying music with an unparalleled dramatic sensibility and adding a kind of virtuosity and artistry that contemporary music has rarely seen before.

Park Avenue Armory

20 - 22 May, 2024

Recital Series

May 21, 2024

Shall We Gather at the River

Jun 1, 2024

Antagonisms: a Gathering

5 - 12 Sep, 2024

R.o.s.e.

Sep 8, 2024

Day for Night: a Salon on Art and Nightlife

Park Avenue Armory

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